scholarly journals Psychology and Ethical Epistemology

2022 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 081-102
Author(s):  
Ayman Shihadeh
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Realism ◽  
Value Judgements

We examine a hitherto unstudied debate, turning on the epistemology of value judgements, between Ashʿarīs and Baṣran Muʿtazilīs of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Al-Ghazālī and al-Rāzī countered Muʿtazilī ethical realism, here defended by al-Malāḥimī, by developing an emotive subjectivism underpinned by increasingly sophisticated psychological accounts of ethical motivation. Value judgements, they maintained, arise not from knowledge of some ethical attributes of acts themselves, but from subjective inclinations, which are often elusive because they can be unconscious or indirect. We also argue against the widespread notion that Ashʿarīs espoused an anti-rationalist ethics, and we show that they were not only ethical rationalists, but also the more innovative side in this debate.

History and Morality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Bloxham
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Country ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Majority Opinion ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
Value Judgements ◽  
The Impact

Against majority opinion within his profession, Donald Bloxham argues that it is legitimate, often unavoidable, and frequently important for historians to make value judgements about the past. History and Morality draws on a wide range of historical examples, and its author’s insights as a practising historian. Examining concepts like impartiality, neutrality, contextualization, and the use and abuse of the idea of the past as a foreign country, Bloxham’s book investigates how the discipline has got to the point where what is preached can be so inconsistent with what is practised. It illuminates how far tacit moral judgements infuse works of history, and how strange those histories would look if the judgements were removed. Bloxham argues that rather than trying to eradicate all judgemental elements from their work historians need to think more consistently about how, and with what justification, they make the judgements that they do. The importance of all this lies not just in the responsibilities that historians bear towards the past—responsibilities to take historical actors on those actors’ own terms and to portray the impact of those actors’ deeds—but also in the role of history as a source of identity, pride, and shame in the present. The account of moral thought in History and Morality has ramifications far beyond the activities of vocational historians.

Narrative Form and Literary Adaptation in the Medieval North

2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-235
Author(s):  
Alastair Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Form ◽  
Narrative Coherence ◽  
Literary Adaptation ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Value Judgements ◽  
Literary Relations

AbstractAround 1300, ›Hertig Fredrik av Normandie‹, one of the foundational works of medieval Swedish literature, was translated from a German source of which no trace has survived. This article exposes the anachronistic expectations about narrative coherence that underpin existing attempts to reconstruct that source and how it was adapted. By focusing on the end of the bridal-quest action, the article advocates a revision of value judgements about the (in)competence of the Swedish translator. In doing so, it shows how narrative poetics can open up new approaches to medieval literary relations between Germany and Scandinavia, as well as to the literary historiography of lost texts more generally.

Was tut ein Geschichtsschreiber?

Philologus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 164 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-2689
Author(s):  
Thomas Kuhn-Treichel
Keyword(s):  
First Case ◽  
Value Judgements ◽  
Modern Era

AbstractLucian’s work De historia conscribenda not only presents reflections on how one should or should not write history, but also illustrates possible ways to represent the authorial activity of a historian (i. e. how one writes ‘metahistory’). In this, two basic forms can be distinguished, both of which can be understood from a narratological perspective as metalepses. In the first case, the historian is represented as the direct originator of the action; in the second he acts as a mere observer, but one who moves spatially in and with his action. Both forms of statement stand within traditions of motifs that can be traced from antiquity through to the modern era; yet Lucian nonetheless makes an innovative contribution by inscribing value judgements into the motifs. The result is the suggestion that the historian fulfils the role of observer, while the role of originator turns out to be more apt for the poet than for the historian. This permits far-reaching conclusions to be drawn about the conception of poetry and historiography as a whole.

scholarly journals ON OBJECTIVES AND VALUE JUDGEMENTS

1965 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-184
Author(s):  
ERIC G. SAINT
Keyword(s):  
Value Judgements

scholarly journals Value judgements

Nature ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 500 (7464) ◽  
pp. 521-523
Author(s):  
George Szpiro
Keyword(s):  
Value Judgements

scholarly journals Computer knows best? The need for value-flexibility in medical AI

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 156-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind J McDougall
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Shared Decision Making ◽  
Patient Autonomy ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Treatment Decision ◽  
Shared Decision ◽  
Treatment Decision Making ◽  
Value Judgements ◽  
The Relationship

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being developed for use in medicine, including for diagnosis and in treatment decision making. The use of AI in medical treatment raises many ethical issues that are yet to be explored in depth by bioethicists. In this paper, I focus specifically on the relationship between the ethical ideal of shared decision making and AI systems that generate treatment recommendations, using the example of IBM’s Watson for Oncology. I argue that use of this type of system creates both important risks and significant opportunities for promoting shared decision making. If value judgements are fixed and covert in AI systems, then we risk a shift back to more paternalistic medical care. However, if designed and used in an ethically informed way, AI could offer a potentially powerful way of supporting shared decision making. It could be used to incorporate explicit value reflection, promoting patient autonomy. In the context of medical treatment, we need value-flexible AI that can both respond to the values and treatment goals of individual patients and support clinicians to engage in shared decision making.

How Biotechnology Regulation Separates Ethics from Risk

1997 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 145-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Carr ◽  
Les Levidow
Keyword(s):  
Agricultural Biotechnology ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Expert Assessment ◽  
Response Regulators ◽  
The Public ◽  
Value Judgements ◽  
Biotechnology Regulation

In the public debate about agricultural biotechnology, an important source of dispute has been the industry's stated aim of further industrializing agriculture. Critics and proponents have argued their case using the language of risk, which entails an implicit ethics, in response, regulators have tended to separate ‘risk ’ from ‘ethics ’, and assign judgements about each to specialists. This administrative separation encourages public deference to expert assessment. By treating implicit value judgements as merely technical matters, such regulation serves to legitimize the biotechnology R&D priorities and marginalize any broader public debate. Thus the official scope of ‘bioethics ’ is itself political.

THE ETHICAL BASES OF PUBLIC POLICIES: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prasanta K. Pattanaik ◽  
Yongsheng Xu
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Value Judgements ◽  
Ethical Evaluations ◽  
Ethical Criteria ◽  
Exclusive Focus

This paper develops a conceptual framework, which can accommodate a wide range of value judgements used in ethical evaluations of extended social states and which can be used to differentiate different categories of value judgements by referring to the type of information on which they may be based. The notions of consequentialism, non-consequentialism, exclusive focus on personal well-being, exclusive focus on utility, etc. are conceptualized in operational ways in the framework. The framework and the discussion of different types of ethical criteria that may be used in evaluating extended social states contribute to conceptual clarity about the ethical bases of public policies.

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